Is there anything sadder, more infuriating, more apocalyptic than a 13-year-old with absolutely nothing in his eyes? No mischief, no sadness, no desire, no energy, no love, no anger, not even a deliberate pose of apathy?

There he was standing in front of the stairwell of the bus, earbuds in ears, 24-oz soda in hand, face ravaged with acne, staring into space. I sat directly across.

He threw his half-full soda into the stairwell—well, dropped it really, and not accidentally. He just didn’t care.

Count one against him. This is the point at which my righteous, good-citizen face started burning with blunted rage. Lousy kid. Should I say something? Should I not say something? He was a honky, I was a honky, so I could wag my bony 41-year-old finger at him without feeling like an imperialist pig.

Then out from his pocket came the stickers. You’ve seen these. They’re about the size of the “Hello, My Name Is” stickers but they’re blank and kids put their graffiti tags on them, then stick them here and there. It’s like Tagging Lite, I guess, because it’s easier to slap those stickers around than to do a full-on tagging, which I’ve also witnessed on the bus and been pissed off by.

Boom. Up goes sticker number one on the plexiglass partition. I’ve seen “good” tags (dramatic, clever, containing visual puns, photogenic, inventive) and I’ve seen lousy ones, and boy was this one lousy. Just your bog-standard ugly jumble of black letters.

He scanned around behind him – not alertly, not foxily, just roundly and dumbly, the way a drunk looks at the ground before taking his next step. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe it hadn’t just been soda in his dropped-in-the-stairwell soda.

I looked around, too. Was anyone noticing this? Was anyone seeing this? Did anyone give a damn? It was the warm Saturday of Pride Weekend, and the bus was stuffed with earbudded hipsters behind grasshopper-eye sunglasses, their maws full of slopping bubble gum and lip studs. If they did notice this kid demeaning their public services, either they’d tell themselves it was all harmless fun, or wouldn’t want to risk being perceived as uptight by speaking up.

Or, certain Facebook exchanges have led me to believe, in fact they cared a lot but lacked the sort of script for what to say to a wayward younger peer.

Boom. Up went sticker number two. Same pointless tag, same braindead expression on the kid’s face.

Ah shit, Jen, you’re going to say something, aren’t you? You’re not going to be able to stop yourself, are you? It’s probably going to fuck up your whole weekend too, as you quarterback the incident again and again in your mind and ask yourself what you could have done differently, or tell yourself you just should’ve kept your big mouth shut. Dammit, why is this stuff always up to me? Why can’t anyone else be the Culture Cop for a change? Sometimes I think someone needs to slip me a random mickey every now and again, it’d give me a much-needed mental vacation from caring too much.

I reached over and poked him in the XXL t-shirted ribs. It took a few pokes to even get his attention. He removed his earbuds in slow motion.

Messed up.

“Hey,” I said, “don’t do that. Stop doing that. It’s ugly.”

Sneer, roll of the eyes. My first from a teenager, as a non-teenager! Yay! Now I’m a grown-up!

“Come on,” he drawled.

But he stopped. For a while. Then sticker number three went up on some relatively low-visibility piece of railing. Was that a compromise? Now that I’d done my snickety thing he had to do one more to prove I had no power over him.

The bus, almost at my destination, waited for what seemed like ten minutes at the junction of Upper Market and 18th Street, right before the 33’s treacherous hairpin turn into the Castro. I was still burning all over from fright and rage. Is that why I do this crazy shit? For the adrenaline rush?

But don’t-give-a-shit kids are probably so rarely and randomly scolded by the public, people like me seem to them like oddities, earnest psychotics amusing themselves in mysterious ways, or time travelers groping for a keyhole back into some hoary mist of Avalon.

I stared hard at him. He never looked at me, but plainly knew I was looking.

At long last the bus opened its doors to my stop, and as I stepped down and out, I couldn’t resist picking his discarded soda back up off the ground and brandishing it in his face before the bus doors snapped shut.

“And pick up your damn trash, too!” I snarled. But, with his earbuds back in, he must have seen me as some mouthing female sea monster below him, nipping at the shore of his lysergic little island. His eyes were dead, flat, unabsorbing.

So did I do any good? Did my anger vent make him think? Did any hipsters dig my direct action and get a script for future Lousy Kid interventions?

Let’s be clear: my feelings about graffiti and vandalism are complex.

In March 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, I got laid off from my umpteenth media job and decided to take a road trip to LA. On Venice Beach, I spied a colorful graffiti wall that was constantly being worked on, constantly in flux, and obviously an accepted part of the landscape there. An artist worked on either side as I snapped photos of the images and words evolving. With the freedom to take their time, the artists could apply a level of detail and creativity they couldn’t if they were just tagging on the fly. With the impending war in the background, freedom of speech issues were very much on my mind, and this wall gave me a revelation: graffiti is media for poor people.

Even if you’re just tagging, there is a kind of message there, which is, “Hello! I’m here! I’m me! I matter!” And who hasn’t wanted to say that?

Still and all, it upsets me to see kids so young engaging in tagging when it’s clear they’re not just being obnoxious but starting to make really poor decisions with their lives. When a gang of taggers leaps up and starts hitting an already-nearly-destroyed bus, I pick up heavily on their rite-of-passage adrenaline. As they shout and egg each other on, their brotherly bonding saddens and repulses me. I want to smack them or shake them: Don’t you care about anything?!

Then when I deduce why they don’t care about anything…I don’t know. I just wish someone at home had really shown them the way.

Taggers could fend off a lot of hostility if they just chose their targets a little more logically. There’s an old folks’ home down the street from me, and they’re constantly getting tagged. Come on, guys, you don’t have grandparents? Nobody in your family does home care for a living? All those people need a break, big time.

A friend of mine works at a nonprofit providing vital services to a poor community in Oakland. Her office is always getting tagged, too. To paraphrase her response, “Like I don’t have anything better to do with my time than get out the can of cover-up paint in the morning again?”

Which brings us to our beleaguered public transit system. Sure, I’m mad at MUNI. You’re mad at MUNI. It needs fixing. Is that any reason to degrade and filthy the buses we all rely on? When you fuck up the buses, it’s demoralizing to those who use the system.

That means YOU, Sticker Boy. MUNI is not The Man. MUNI subsidizes your transportation, especially if you jumped your fare, which you probably did for maximum mucho-macho street cred. You’d be well advised to direct your anger elsewhere, such as City Hall. With the spill in the Gulf, we need to fight harder than ever for a transit system that saves oil, and citizen-to-citizen, we need to keep the buses nice for all of us.

Better (as in more morally acceptable) places for graffiti: the backs of street signs (definitely not the fronts. I once got a $250 parking ticket because someone put a sticker over a bus stop sign so I didn’t know not to park there – I appealed but the court showed no mercy), abandoned buildings and other derelict eyesores, or intelligence-insulting ad billboards.

Have you ever randomly intervened when you saw a young person doing something wrong? Does part of you not want to risk their disapproval? Have you ever wanted to intervene, but were afraid? Send me your stories.

“Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.” –Jaron Lanier, “You Are Not a Gadget,” Knopf, 2010

The New York Times’ “Your Brain on Computers” series last week gave me a sense of relief. So I wasn’t the only one who’s noticed that, well, everyone and everything in the last five-odd years has gone completely and utterly cuckoo.

Example: people spend wads of cash on concerts, only to spend the entire event ignoring the action onstage while they text, Twitter, phone, and email. They only time they pay attention to what they’ve paid good money to see is when they take photos of it, so they can immediately turn their experience into an uploadable commodity, with which they brand themselves online. “Hey everybody, here I am! My life is more exciting than yours!”

Nobody seems to notice that this dilutes the energy of live performance in the first place and makes the whole affair banal and rather depressing.

But just standing there and enjoying the music without gadgetizing it somehow? Nowadays? Unthinkable! The gadgets are what make live events “real,” because this is how people understand reality. Instead of “Be Here Now” we have “Be Nowhere All the Time.” At this point I’m nostalgic for two years ago.

Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget” addresses and affirms my discontent on so many different levels, I feel like grabbing a highlighter pen and dousing every word with it. One of the original architects of virtual reality, Lanier is not only deep in the pudding of Silicon Valley ideology (and yes, Virginia, you’d better believe there is a Silicon Valley ideology), he’s a hell of a writer.

You Are Not a Gadget unpacks what I’ve suspected for years: that the nerds who have made the world over in their image are driven by vast, sweeping theories of what people are, what reality is, and why we’re here on earth.

But unlike the ideologies that politicians espouse, nerd dogma reprograms the very architecture of how we think. We’re far more susceptible to it because we’re not even aware it’s in us.

Jaron Lanier will be speaking this week, June 17, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum here in San Francisco. It’s going to be an important and fascinating talk, and it’s free. Please join me!

Your Honor, it’s not that I don’t want to be well-informed and engaged. It’s not that I want to be oblivious or whinge about my “bandwidth” or take the New Age cop-out of “news fasting” in order to salvage my personal sense of serenity.

And God forbid I become one of those “the news is so depressing” people. It’s the news’s job to be depressing, and in past decades, the shoddy way it’s reported or the trivia that passes as news adds myriad and multi-colored depths to anyone’s Dark Night of the News Junkie Soul.

It’s more that, in this hyper-democratized media whirlwind called everyday life in the 21st century, I feel the need to respond thoughtfully and thoroughly in some way to just about everything I read.

EV-ER-Y-THING.

Being a writer is a bit like being a doctor. You can never really clock out from the responsibility, and you never want to anyway. You feel surrounded on all sides by crappy writing, sloppy thinking, half-baked editorial standards, nonexistent respect for basic grammar and spelling — and that’s just the actual “content” being thrown at or sold to you! The comments posted below any given article are typically a blizzard of aggressive stupidity, made more aggressively stupid by otherwise reasonable, mild-mannered people needing to publicly mourn the loss of civil dialogue by calling everyone else idiots.

Where does a writer find herself in all this?

Virtually speaking? Everywhere.

Raise your calm, even-handed voice! cry the civil society advocates. Fed up with a lack of intelligent exchange? Then simply start one yourself! It’s that simple!

Is it? I don’t even look at YouTube comments anymore, I know what my reaction will be. Like some digital Dudley Do-Right, I’ll be clacking away for hours, backgrounding and fact-checking my evidence that, no, SavageIdaho44, Barbra Streisand was not a KGB mole from Jupiter, and anyway, who’s in a position to pass judgement until they’ve watched Color Me Barbra in its entirety?

Then there’s the “Stupid Me” factor that unfolds slowly, year after year, with maturity and wisdom. You just realize more and more that you don’t know shit about anything, and you start to feel reeeeeeally guilty about it. Oil spill in the Gulf? What do I think should be done? OK, um — domestic drilling, how many drills do we have? What percentage of our oil supply is domestic? How did this happen? Was I supposed to be aware of how this could happen? What’s the regulatory background on this? What’s the political background? How does an oil drill work? How do you fix one? How old are most drills? Was I supposed to know that? Man, I’ve really fallen off the map with this issue…I swear, I just trying to survive from day to day…ugh…Stupid Me! Stupid Me! Stupid Me!

Meanwhile, nobody around you seems taken aback by an event like this; it’s as though they’ve been discussing that bum drill for years over Sunday coffee, as though it were some Victorian radiator hissing in the corner. “Marge, I tell ya, any day now that thing’s gonna blow, and believe you me there’ll hell to pay…”

Suddenly, everyone majored in Oil Spills in college. Everyone knows what went wrong, who’s to blame, what should happen, what the charts and the graphs mean, all the actors in the play. But at no point does anyone ever impart that they had to actually sit down and spend some time figuring it all out.

For me, there are the bits and pieces I pick up in the coffee room or by glancing at newspaper headlines. I have never, Your Honor, sat down and just crammed on the Gulf spill crisis like a good citizen, assiduously comparing the Beeb against Fox, bookmarking the Guardian and the Economist and the Monitor and the Financial Times, knitting my studious brows so that I could assert the major bullet points at my local house of public drinking or my town hall.

Because if I started, I would not be able to stop. My sense of total, all-consuming impotence and ignorance would drive me to a state of X-treme citizenship for which there seems to be no cure but quitting one’s job and clackety-clacking all day in the eerie blue glow of cyber-alienation. There are no boundaries, no limits, to the ways and means I can inform myself, 24/7, of everything, everywhere, forever. Feeling I have a handle on one issue will just make me obsessed with another.

I throw myself upon the mercy of the court. I’m on Auto-Citizenship Drive. I have so much to say it hurts.

Go ahead and sentence me to Community Service. I might actually learn something.

Whenever I head back to an old cafe or restaurant I once loved, or approach one that looks cool from the outside, these days it’s always with a sense of dread. From the outside, the place always looks sweet and inviting: intimate lighting, cozy tables, a view of the sidewalk, square, or park. The closer I get to walking through its doors, the more deeply I feel that longing for respite from the outside world that’s as old as civilization itself; I want quiet, shelter, nourishment, a place that protects me but brings me into warm contact with others. I want a place that incubates a mealtime conversation with my companion, or if I’m alone, a sense of connection with strangers who could be my friends.

What the restaurant gives me instead, more often than not these days, is flatscreen television. A blinding rectangle of strobing nonsense culture — an assumption that, as a customer, I’m totally incapable of whiling away some minutes at my table however I choose, perhaps by doing nothing much at all.

The ubiquitous flatscreens are a depressing epidemic that I believe is ruining what little post-cell-phone public space we still have. Are restaurants subjecting us to TV because customers are asking for it, or are customers asking for it because they’re now used to TV in restaurants, or are struggling restaurants just freaked out by the quiet and stillness of what was once called atmosphere?

I tried to answer these questions and more in my article “Real People, Real Places,” published with Shareable.net. I hope you’ll read it and give me your feedback on how to speak back to the restaurant and hospitality industry about keeping our places — and ourselves — conversational, atmospheric and real.

[This is the final of three installments of this incomplete essay.]

Of course the real problem, the root of all evil, is that each and every day of my life, I commit the Unforgiveable Sin of modern American life: I am content.

I’m not even sure why. I read a book or write while riding the bus to work, I watch people, I drink coffee, I can do some research or writing if there’s down-time, I socialize with the folks in the lunch room who are also support-staff bohemian barnacles like me, and when the weekend comes and I have a little cash, I may as well be Aristotle Onassis. I’m a free agent in a city with a thousand different cool things to do, most of which don’t cost that much.

Advertisers and manufacturers hate people like me. I don’t buy anything. When my CD boom box started skipping a few years ago, I put in some phone calls to engineer friends, took a few notes, and just fixed the damned thing myself. I’m still using it today, 12 years after purchase. I was supposed to throw it out and get a new one, then throw that out when I got an iPod.

My guess is that there are legions of people like me in the world; we’re just invisible and voiceless because we’re not a significant marketing demographic in a culture and political system based on marketing demographics. We don’t buy, therefore we’re not.

I don’t own a car or a television, and though rising fuel and energy prices have recently shifted the tide, most of my family still seem to think that doing without either of these items amounts to some masochistic, self-righteous sacrifice for the greater good, rather than a decadent lifestyle improvement. Riding the transit system gives me the luxury of extra time and energy; I don’t need a television because I have a picture window that looks out on Golden Gate Park, the massive weather systems sweeping in from the Pacific Ocean, an Orthodox Jewish pre-school teeming with squirrelly whimsical children, and public basketball courts bustling with tough kids playing games of pick-up. This is my television. I feel it informs me far more effectively than a sixty-dollar-a-month cable subscription.

But there is no shorthand to explain all this to the wedding guests, who are now being assailed by DJ Smooth Operator announcing the first dance of the lovely bride and groom.

Really, I should go down and at least try again to circulate among them; for the thousandth time of my life I think it all through, and there’s no rational reason for me to feel as uncomfortable as I do around these people.

For one thing, I look like them. I bear the genetic imprint not just of my family but of my social class of origin: tall, high-cheekboned, Nordic, strong-framed, upright. I rode a hotel elevator with a whole herd of us this morning – strangers I could have been related to, the by-products of country-club eugenics, their features and bearing tightened with defensive pride.

When I am in downtown San Francisco and desperately need to use a restroom, I make for the lobby of the St. Francis or the Palace Hotel. Even when poorly dressed or disheveled, I am never stopped, never questioned, never asked in that incriminating tone whether I can be helped. The doormen and the concierges have all been told – and I know because I’ve done temp gigs in these places and I’ve talked to these guys – to watch for anyone who looks as though they don’t belong.

In jeans and a t-shirt, making a beeline for the toilets, I look as though I belong. It’s not just the tallness and the blondness, the middle-class jawline; I radiate entitlement. It’s clear that at some point in my life at least, I was used to being in these places. My line of sight and my gait are steady. I know exactly the open, benign apathy with which to fix my face as I wander the halls. The uniformed guardians of the establishment clock me as I pass with the same open, benign apathy.

The beautiful toilets of the world are mine, all mine.

Not so for everyone.

And how long did it take me to realize that?

And what of this bathroom here, with the coffee table Picasso retrospective I just finished? Oh, why can’t I just go out there and be a wedding guest?! Is it really so difficult?

Certainly my attire is not the problem. When it comes to dressing for occasions, I can out-Republican the Republicans. You think you know high-heeled shoes? You think your clutch bag is subtle and understated? Step aside, ladies. My chignon is piled higher than yours. My button-pearl earrings are smaller and more finicky than yours. My little black dress is littler and blacker and dressier. My heels can stop bullets, and my saturated red lipstick is more Eisenhower-era than your lousy lavender lipgloss. You may make me feel like an underachieving peasant, but I make you look like slobs.

This is my one silent form of protest, of social theatre, of camp aggression. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from decades of befriending, working with, reporting to, and voting for flaming homosexuals, it’s how to don the uniform of those who suffocate you, give it your own slight twist, and throw it back in the face of your oppressors – hopefully in such an underhanded way that they don’t even get it. They welcome you with open arms even as you undermine the exclusionary conditions on which they base their welcome.

But if my get-up is the armor with which I protect myself in battle it is also the costume in which I perform my desperate plea for love and acceptance: See me! Look at my face! Observe my warm, human neuroses! I apologize for none of them! Observe that my choices have been valid ones! I have nothing but my eyes with which to say this!

The wine has made me raw and combative, on the brink. I don’t trust myself. I might say something, something too big to be said. If I say anything longer than “Yes,” “No,” or “Goodbye,” it will take all night and I will say it to anyone.

Do I hate these people? Do I hate the way they talk, act, look? Do I hate the grey-templed men who barrel their chests out of their camel blazers and back-slap and HAW-HAW-HAW over their shot glasses, their mouths yawping out of their Scotch-reddened faces? Do I hate the leathery-faced tennis club babes in the blonde newscaster coifs who gaze unsmilingly through the festivities like zoo lionesses jabbed with tranquilizer? Do I hate the Beautiful Children in their Beautiful Children clothes who already know the part they’re playing?

Do I hate the ones who truly believe nobody ever helped them, whose mental bio-pics of themselves conveniently write out of the script the inheritance, the annuity, the paid-for college education? Do I hate the ones who will never admit they can’t stand learning anything, that they’re too weak and frightened to examine those things over which they have no control?

Do I hate the odd few who really did claw their way to the top unaided, and now feel the need to mention this every five minutes in conversation? Who think that hard work is some sort of spiritual charge account on which they can rack up six digits’ worth of self-centered beliefs that the rest of us will end up paying for?

Yes. I hate them. I hate them. I hate being in their houses, I hate smiling for their photos, I hate the language they speak, the rewarded narcissism, the cheerful oblivion.

Why? What have they done to me?

Well, nothing really, they just offend me.

Wait. They did do something to me.

They acted as lightning rods for my family’s insecurities about themselves. They made us feel like shit. Of course, we let them, but it was a small town. There was nothing else to do. There was no clear path by which we could choose immunity to their games and demonstrate that openly without suffering consequences.

I hate them because they were in our house without physically being there, like dirty ghosts.

If in their presence I live up their scowling expectations of me, it’s because of my deep, inherent knowledge that I have no place in their world – less of a place than a total stranger would have. They could assume a total stranger would want to emulate and be like them.

They can make no such assumption about me. I have had every opportunity, have been groomed in every aspect of my education and points of reference to – figuratively speaking – drive the Lexus.

I am not driving the Lexus. It is now clear, at my age, that I will never drive the Lexus. My family’s friends know where I live, they know how I work; I keep the details of my day-to-day life on the down-low and they accordingly imagine the worst. I am among them, but I am not of them, and nothing has really equipped them to deal with that.

Exactly why don’t I drive the Lexus? Because I can’t, or because I choose not to? This question plagues me, and every family gathering sends me into bouts of mental acrobatics trying to answer it.

“So Jennifer, what is it you do up in San Francisco these days?”

“I’m a proofreader.”

The deliberate suspension of their judgment of me is as palpable as a barely contained fart: the highlights in their eyes dim and retreat, the smiles become a form of facial calisthenics, the nodding is something they are telling themselves to do.

But the kind, gracious ladies at the wedding are very practiced in this kind of thing. They know just how to neutralize the subject at hand. What fond memories they have of me as a child! What an interesting, fascinating, unique little girl I was! Such an individual type! And so intelligent. The old stories are dragged out once more: You spent my child’s sixth birthday party reading our stacks of Time magazine instead of eating cake and ice cream (I did?! What was I thinking?! Obviously I knew nothing about how to party. You snag the cake and ice cream and *then* lock yourself in the bathroom with the reading material.)! While still in grammar school, Jen, you would make the most profound observations about people and society! You were able to read and write at college level by the fifth grade!

So why aren’t you rich? they are thinking, but don’t say. They accentuate the positive, no matter how many decades ago that happened to be.

And suddenly there’s another phantom me, one that wants to say, sorry. I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you. I’m sorry I’ve made you doubt that anyone who’s intelligent and works hard will live the way you do. I’m sorry the spectacular promise I showed as a child appears to have come to nothing in particular, that the endeavors I have found worthwhile and fulfilling would seem to you either banal or baffling: hammering out a nonprofit mission statement for minimum wage; being named unpaid staff writer at a well-respected underground magazine (that then went out of business); romping around Europe by myself right after 9/11, when everyone else was terrified of driving ten miles from home.

So there’s another, deeper, stronger, more obnoxious phantom me that steps forward, looks these women dead in the eyes and says, no, I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry one bit. You may be disappointed in me, but I am disappointed in the stories you live by, as they will inevitably disappoint you.

If asked on the street, you would agree that everyone makes mistakes, that everyone is frail and human, that we all end up in the same final place. But how can you really understand these things when your culture enshrines the mythology that because someone is young and good-looking and upwardly mobile, they will always be so, their skyward trajectory will simply continue forever because of its attractive present state? When it doesn’t continue, you cannot forgive them for it, as you cannot forgive yourselves when you finally show signs of earthly mortality.

If the Phantom Me had come true, by now the talk about her would have gotten demoted from “Isn’t she amazing?” to “Poor Jen, that husband just left her for some young thing” or “Apparently Jen’s youngest boy just got packed off to military school” or “You know, she never did lose that extra weight after those two kids.”

And to be fair, much of their concern is pragmatic. With the way things are now, how will I survive in the long term? How will I not end up in a place of extreme financial vulnerability? Owning property nowadays more often than not requires earning six digits a year, moving to the “exurbs” and pulling a nightmarish commute, soothing your boredom and stress with a constant stream of new consumer items racked up on your credit card. Even if I were willing to do any of that, my skill set wouldn’t qualify me for the hot job, the grind would destroy my health and put me in medical debt, and my overall higher-ups would sense that I just wasn’t cut out for the life. They would be right.

This is the thing. It’s not that I have nothing in common with the Phantom Me. It’s not as though I’ve never had an I Need to Get Serious phase in my life; I’ve had several. I’ve put on the nice suit, I’ve rehearsed the interview answers, I’ve beefed up the portfolio, I’ve sat down more times than I can remember to try to “figure it all out,” to squeeze the meanderings of my achievements and interests into some sort of linear path that suggests the sort of soaring future that would make sense to my family, that would finally speak their language.

But each time, with few exceptions, “it” doesn’t want to be figured out. Something in me has always just said no.

[This is an excerpt from a longer essay I'm working on. Enjoy.]

The wedding guests were exquisite. Uniformly tall, fair, fit, handsome and broad-featured in a way that suggested a rigorous course of childhood orthodontics. The men, regardless of age, wore pale blue Oxford shirts and navy blazers with flat brass buttons, their hair swept confidently back from their fine faces. The women, regardless of age, were in matching jewelry sets and tasteful, professionally advised makeup.

The elders among them were distinguished and dignified. The young were straight-backed and fresh and drove newer models of cars.

The bride was beautiful; the groom striking and affable, comfortable in his skin as he made the rounds of guests and caught up with each one. They assembled for the reception at an old family friend’s house nestled in the hills, a rambling, time-worn family seat embraced by ancient oak trees. Its shelves were lined with coffee table art books and eclectic mementos of world travels. To walk the halls and whiff the oils of rare woods in the furniture and watch the oak-dappled afternoon sunlight nod upon the faces of patriarchs immortalized in oil portraits on the walls was to imagine that all the world was like this, that everyone everywhere was couched in success, gentility, and quietly self-assured entitlement.

And even as I downed multiple glasses of their fine wine, plowed through the caterer’s critically acclaimed steaks (yes, that’s steaks, plural, they were not small and I ate more than one), and cased their master bedroom for cool books and made shadow puppets on the wall with an eight-year-old fellow guest – the continual realization was clear: This will never be my world.

It was not a depressed or depressing thought. More a wondering, amused one, as most of my thoughts these days are wondering and amused.

Because really, this was supposed to be my world – this, or a neat, scaled-down, small-town version of it.

This was October 2008. Under normal circumstances, the fine cars and doctor/lawyer shop talk and mentions of children in UCLA law school amidst the classical guitarist’s delicate pluckings would all be the unnoticed bathysphere of a certain world and its inhabitants.

Now there was a palpable sense that the rug could be yanked out from under all this at any moment. Conversation struggled to break free from the topic of the economy; it never quite succeeded. Huddles of men stood with their heads together while the wives dutifully shouldered the burden of festivity, hospitably buzzed and dramatizing their pleasure at seeing each other.

The sets and props of their lifestyle would remain, but the scaffolding underneath was about to change forever. In a matter of months a man would be president who, if he approached this gathering unknown, would probably be handed an apron and directed to the kitchen or the alleyway entrance.

Wandering the magical, lovingly tended grounds outside, chatting easily with the svelte and gracious guests, was the Phantom Me. The Me I was supposed to turn out as, the Me that fit. The Me that took some initiative and made all the right moves.

Bolting myself inside the host’s well-appointed bathroom (my lifelong mature and reasonable method for dealing with any type of social disconnect) and selecting an oversized German-print Picasso retrospective from the toilet-side book rack, I peeked from the second-story window to the feasting tables down below, and took a moment to chart the Fool’s Progress of the Phantom Me.

Let’s see, what happened to her once she got that college degree? Once she got shot out of that hallowed cannon of upward mobility and was now expected to fly?

Her beginnings wouldn’t have been too different from mine. She would have spent her post-collegiate years with multiple roommates in a major metropolitan area, eating spaghetti and taking crummy little liberal arts gigs. Perhaps her city of choice would have even been San Francisco, but more likely L.A. or Orange County.

Then at some point, probably shortly before her 30th birthday, she would have had some sort of I Have to Get Serious crisis. Her tolerance for burritos and shitty living conditions would have eroded and collapsed into talk of Something to Show and biological clocks and marriage as milestone achievement.

She would have armed herself for battle with a Banana Republic shift dress and button-pearl earrings and landed an associate development director gig at the L.A. Symphony.

The Phantom Me would have shined in this role. It would have combined her excellent communication skills (99 percentile on her verbal SATs in high school, remember?) with her softcore bohemianism and “creative side.” She would be promoted within two years.

The course of her work would have opened new social doors for her; she would make the sort of friends who went on spa weekends and pricey yoga retreats. She would have circulated at fundraisers and made a wonderful impression on the legions of fascinating, presentable trustafarians. Her husband would have been plucked from this circle, attracted by her effervescent charm and worldliness.

The wedding would have been spectacular, and her parents would nearly have heart attacks before the Big Day, worried sick that they’d come across as carpetbagging slobs to the Nice People of her husband’s world.

I would have squirted two Beautiful Children into the Montessori school system, and it would be this, truly, that would seal my membership in the blue-blazer world; the seemingly unending trajectory of triumph in all arenas of my life would be such that, like an abundant force of nature, it would have no choice but to replicate itself and continue my incredible story.

Had I turned out the Phantom Me, even my liberalism would be forgiven. Because I would be the right kind of liberal. The one who hugs the whales and the gay interior decorators, is endearingly flighty and dingbatty and easily dismissed. I would not be the articulate crank who yammers on about economic justice and living wages before telling you which five obscure, unwatchable documentaries you have to see before I will even fucking talk to you. I would instead be a full-time mother and full-time arts fundraiser, the kind of woman about whom today’s wedding guests would whisper, “Isn’t she amazing? I don’t know how she does it!”

But I’m now 39. It would be at this very point when the whispers about the Phantom Me along the grapevine would inevitably darken, because despite the steep upward trellis onto which the thoughts of comfortable Americans are trained, everyone – everyone – eventually either fucks up or is fucked.

I know well what these whispers sound like. My mother is constantly updating me, in meaningless chunks, on people in her circle whose names and lives I have long since ceased to know or care about: Maggie got cancer, Shelly got divorced, Mark can’t find a job, Casey is on anti-depressants, Melanie got pregnant by a man who won’t marry her, Bob’s kids are drug fiends, Cathy’s daughter married an Iranian (but we’ve heard he’s very nice!), Richard’s son turned out gay (and please make no mistake: there are still vast groups of people for whom these last two tidbits would be announcements of tragedy and failure).

“So Jennifer, what is it you do up in San Francisco these days?”

“I’m a proofreader.”

[This concludes Part One of The Kid Is All Right: Meet the Failure I'm Not. Hopefully more will be forthcoming as I complete it.]

I’m not a millionaire. I don’t own a home in the Bay Area, nor am I ever likely to. But if I did, here’s what I’d do.

I would take out a large ad in the local paper (or whatever online rumor-and-hearsay mill people now mistake for local journalism) and put my friendly, goofy, waving-hi photograph in it.

The copy would read as follows:

Hello. I’m Jen Burke Anderson, and I’m your neighbor. I live at 123 Maple Street, and I work at such-and-such a place. Some of you may have seen me around, and now you know my name and where I live.

On Halloween Eve, I’d like to invite you and your kids to my house for trick-or-treating. For those too young to remember, this means that your kids will wear adorable costumes, come up my walkway with all the cool glowing jack-o-lanterns, ring my doorbell, yell trick-or-treat! when I answer, then hold open their trick-or-treating bags (a cheesy SpongeBob pillowcase also works for this) and get some packaged mini-Snickers bars for being so adorable.

I will also be in an adorable costume, and I will throw my hands in the air and squeal what spooky ghosts and goblins your kids are. I will wave hello to you, Mom and Dad, so that you can see I’m a decent person with a fixed address and a nice demeanor, and I can see that you are decent people with fixed addresses and nice demeanors, and going forward I can keep an eye out for your kids whom I now recognize, and we can all stop believing that every other person besides ourselves is a child-poisoning sociopath.

By the time I was trick-or-treating as a kid in the 1970s, the tradition was already fading out. A string of articles had begun running in the media, depicting tales of malicious anonymous strangers ruining kids’ Halloween fun by putting razor blades in candy apples and handing out sleeping pills disguised as candy.

According to USC Sociologist Barry Glassner in his 1999 book “The Culture of Fear,” this damaging, long-running urban legend was kicked off by no less than the New York Times in October of 1970; the media, always hungry for a quick, sexy, easy-to-write-about moral abomination, took the Poison Halloween ball and ran with it through the late 1980s, warning us that trick-or-treating would result in “more horror than happiness”; Dear Abby predicted that this year, “somebody’s child will become violently ill or die” from poison candy or razor blades in apples.

Then a sociologist named Joel Best undertook a study of every Unhappy Halloween incident reported since 1958. Turns out only two of them were actually true — and in each case, it was the child’s nutjob parents, not malicious strangers, who’d done the poisoning.

But to heck with all those “facts” and “studies” from so-called “academics”! We like our Moral Decline stories, and we’re sticking with them. Fear gives us purpose. By the late 1980s the conjecturing around Halloween Horrors had extended to the ridiculous: I remember people saying that now even packaged candy was no longer safe, because gosh, someone could inject the poison into your mini-Butterfinger, and how would you ever know?!

So OK, skip the studies. Let’s just use common sense.

First of all, have you ever tried to stick a razor blade into an apple in such a way that it’s not absurdly obvious to the healthy human eye?

Second, if it turns out that I, as your neighbor, am a child-poisoning sociopath, guess what? You know where I live! You know who I am! You know what I look like! Take a picture, if you want, and press charges! For heaven’s sake, send me to jail if I’ve done something abominable!

Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be the only one in the neighborhood going out on the trick-or-treat limb. I want you to open your homes to trick-or-treaters too, so that we can revive trick-or-treating culture: the nice world some of us can remember, where neighbors recognized each other and looked out for each other. This world didn’t just feel safe; it was safe, because people were collectively accountable.

Trick-or-treating wasn’t just for kids, it was for the grown-ups too. It was a fun way for everyone to see each other, check in with each other, decorate our homes and ourselves, demonstrate our creativity and show something of ourselves.

And, of course, there were the related goofy pranks and the late-night hi-jinks, especially important to teenagers who were testing the boundaries between mischief and malice. Malicious pranks hopefully precipitated a serious talking-to and grounding; mischievous pranks resulted in pants-peeing hilarity and fond memories for years to come. These things should be part of anybody’s happy childhood.

Am I saying there aren’t horrible people in the world who do horrible things? Absolutely not. Some of these people may even be closer to us than we think.

But think about it. Do we really make our world any safer when we take the low road, lock our doors and kill the lights, and impose voluntary martial law on ourselves? Are we so comfortable with understanding every unknown element to be some moral black hole into which our kids will certainly fall, that we would deny them the knowledge that people can be good, that community is something we can easily achieve? Would we deny them a reasonable amount of general good faith to take into adulthood? Is this not a crime in itself?

Come on, bring those little ghosts and goblins by, and invite the others to your homes, too. A stack of Stephen King books doesn’t scare me nearly as much as the idea that we’ll never trust each other enough to have trick-or-treating again.

And if you Big Kids have water balloons, I am so ready for you.

Now, here’s The Mumlers doing “Coffin Factory” off their new album, Don’t Throw Me Away! Happy Halloween!

Between the end of the craziest week and the start of the nuttiest weekend in my recent history (Expo for Independent Arts, the kickoff for KFJC’s fundraiser, and my post-Expo house party were all Saturday), I insanely decided to squeeze in a lunchtime lecture at SF’s Jewish Community Center. It turned out to be one of the most sensible things I’ve done all year.

Karen Armstrong isn’t just another take-it-or-leave-it, “Jesus is groovy, if you feel like it” modern theologian, pathetically tailoring the age-old rigors of spiritual practice to a noncommittal, consumerist public who can’t be bothered to pencil the transcendent into their busy schedules.

Nor is she by any means a church authoritarian. As a young girl I read her autobiographical “Through the Narrow Gate,” chronicling her seven brutal years as a nun in a spartan, pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic order in the early 1960s. The church’s refusal to accommodate her epilepsy and severe food allergies (she was supposed to Learn from the Suffering) shattered any delusions she might have had about the virtues of blind obedience.

Ensconced in a religious institution myself at the time, I admired the honesty of her questioning: not hostile to the church’s stated values of faith, hope, and charity – but not willing to put up with their strong-arm crap, either.

Imagine the smile on my face when, some 20 years after reading the book, I heard her strong, calm, scholarly voice on the radio shortly after 9/11, explaining the finer points of Islam to an under-informed public. She had become a sought-after authority on the subject of world religion.

Having won the prestigious TED Prize in 2008 (recipients are asked to unveil “One Idea to Change the World”), she’s now at work with religious leaders and followers on the Charter for Compassion , a credo uniting the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic principles of “universal justice and respect.”

Some highlights from Armstrong’s talk on September 25:

– The word “belief” originally meant “to love.” It was only in the 17th century that the word attained its modern meaning of holding to a particular idea. The Greek credo – “I believe” – meant more a state of engagement and active investigation, a commitment to finding truth rather than allegiance to a foregone conclusion.

– Religion is about practice and dedication to behaving a certain way. Intellectual understanding or enlightenment is meant to follow the hard work of practice.

– “Love” as it’s used in the book of Leviticus (a legal text) didn’t demand that you had a personal liking or affection for someone; it meant more a simple sense of respect and looking out for the other’s interests.

– Religions are full of metaphors and paradoxes. The verses of the Koran are all metaphoric; the paradox of the Christian trinity is meant to be a meditative exercise; the Jewish tradition of the Midrash (inventive commentaries on Hebrew scripture) provoke investigation on the part of the student. All of this communicates the need for contemplation and intellectual questioning as a component of spiritual practice.

– True compassion requires risk and research. We have a moral obligation to understand the other’s mindset.

– On public dialogue: The classic definition of Socratic “dialogue” didn’t mean a fight in which one side won. In true Socratic dialogue, both sides end up admitting they know nothing! You must go into dialogue prepared to be changed.

– Ensuring the well-being of others is our best security.

It’s Friday night on Labor Day weekend, and  San Francisco is now utterly emptied of interesting people with social lives and disposable income who either went to Burning Man or some place of natural beauty to barbecue meat products with their myriad attractive friends.

One wanders the deserted streets; one is filled with existential dread; one channels Peter Lorre flinching into his trenchcoat lapels in billows of nocturnal port-city fog; one’s quest for amusement begins to lean towards the bizarre, the venal, the stupid.  One develops strange cravings for being in a multiplex shopping center on the outskirts of Detroit, drinking pitchers of beer, gnawing buffalo wings served to you by plasticky-looking sorority chicks with their knockers and cheekage jiggling out of their uniforms, and screaming with others at a Berlin Wall of outsized HDTV screens, with no particular sense of remorse or wondering if there could be anything more to life than this.

One finds herself alone at Hooters in Fisherman’s Wharf.

“In God’s name, WHY?” a friend texted me.

“I just feel like having a bizarre experience,” I texted back.  And really, I was in the mood for some fried food and beer, and perhaps the shrill mortification of a lonely engineer dude chatting me up.  It would be slightly better than boredom.

It took an hour by MUNI to get to Fisherman’s Wharf — and the bus ride more than anything else was what made me deeply question my grip on reality.  Fisherman’s Wharf is an area that strikes dread into the heart of every San Franciscan – more than The Loin, more than The Point, more than the Marina, fer God’s sakes.  When we’re forced at gunpoint to take our relatives there, drag them through the herds of porcine picture-snappers lapping up traffic-cone-sized ice creams, to shrink from 140 decibels of Sheryl Crow screaming IF IT MAKES YOU HAPPYYYYYYY out of the waiting room of Salty Sam’s Seafood Barn, to try to talk our loved ones out of getting their own images emblazoned onto XXXL hoodies with the words Alcatraz Psycho Ward underneath it, all we can think is:  This is what I moved here to get away from!

And yet, the heart has its own reasons.  I found myself at Hooters, checking out the scene that I hoped would be as jarring and alien to my San Franciscan psyche as a naked safari through outer Chad.

“Hi-eeeeeee!” cheered the hostess from behind a 25-foot bank of Hooters merchandise, flipping her black hair around to reveal the Hooters merch that wasn’t technically on sale.  “You kin sit ennywhere you like!”  I got the feeling she’d been told to talk as much as possible like text messages.

I took a seat at the counter a few places down from a Lonely Engineer Dude and started flipping through the menu.  The place was about one-quarter full and business didn’t seem to pick up as the evening progressed.  You know it’s a shitty economy when not even jiggling collegiate cleavage can entice gainfully employed men to spring for some fried mozzerella and pitchers of Pabst.

Strangely, my taste for fried bar snacks and brew had waned after the bus ride, so I went with road food instead.  I can highly recommend the Hooters key lime pie ($5.95 or so) which has an inch or so of divine citrusy cream cheese on top that goes down really well with freshly brewed coffee and the nine or so different basketball games you never knew were happening simultaneously on parallel planets.

I took a look around.  The scattered Lonely Engineer Dudes numbered about three; there were about four Gangs from the Office (that included several women).  There were two couples there who, it was obvious from the coy french-fry-picking and awkward eye contact going on, were on first dates.  Way to go, brah!  Those dating tips from Maxim are so, so solid!

The oddest sight was an Indian man, his sari-wrapped wife, and their young daughter, fixing their gazes with great concentration on their plates of curly fries.  At what point had the gentleman realized the mistake he’d made?  Something told me the concierge at the Holiday Inn would have hell to pay.

I fixed my formidable female-sizing-up skills on my waitress, whom I felt obliged not to oggle in the name of sisterhood.  (The truth was — though I am not that way inclined – I wanted to oggle all of them.  The surroundings and the premise of Hooters, maybe by extension our whole culture, beg you to oggle.  Offered-up breasts are the currency of fashion magazines and reality TV, not key lime pie and basketball games.  The whole Hooters situation is so odd you just want to stare, if not from attraction, from twisted fascination.  I mean — sheesh — there they are.  And it’s not like a strip joint where the whole point is to stare.  Ostensibly you’re just here to eat barbecue burgers and watch the game, you’re conducting a legitimate business transaction.  So how much are you really, morally allowed to stare?  Sometimes I’m so glad I’m not a guy.)  The Evil Queen in me wondered:  will she still be cute at 35?  Still cute after she’s had a few kids, a few years of life on her feet?

No, of course not, I assured myself cattily, then stopped:  How do I know who she really is?  Maybe she’s fascinating.  Maybe she grew up in a war zone.  You don’t know.

Hooters must be so much like high school.  You put on a face, and everyone puts on the face, so there’s this whole “fronting” culture that everyone’s scared to violate — only here, crack the wrong smile and it’s not just the uncool side of the cafeteria for you.   You could lose your job, or get moved to a crappy shift, or whatever.

Jesus, what a nightmare.

Misty of the Key Lime Pie could very well be cool, accomplished, and self-aware once past her maidenhood, but not as who she’s allowed to be here.  The hair-tossing and leaning on the last syllable of her sentences probably rake in the tips, but they will only take her so far.  I just hope she realizes it.

Which got me wondering:  at what age do they “retire” a Hooters waitress?  A Google search on this didn’t reveal much except Flickr pages of (rather unsavory) ex-Hooter girl parties.

I wish I had some outrageous incident to report from going there, but the truth is, Hooters is disappointingly wholesome — at least the watered-down, live-and-let-live SF version.

While every other restaurateur in this town now sees fit to wallpaper his eating establishment with retina-scorching wide-screens (”Hey honey, let’s go out and further lower our IQs tonight!”), SF Hooters only has the little analog boxes.  How are we supposed to drool?

The Hooters menu is cute, with self-effacing jokes about what loveable, we-can’t-help-it lech-bag characters the entrepreneurs are.  And — what is this world coming to?! — you can now order “healthy dining” options approved by a board of dieticians.  The healthy-dining feature is promoted by the cartoon Hooters owl dressed as an MD and giving you a sidelong “Say, let’s play doctor!” glance at the bottom of the menu.

No merry bands of knuckle-dragging apeshits tackled me to the floor.  The Lonely Engineer Dude kept his polite distance.  The women at the office workers’ tables seemed to be having a fine old ironic, post-feminist, what-the-hell kind of time.  Everyone treated the girls with respect and the male management just seemed bored and understandably itchy about all the empty seats.

I left the girls to their Labor-Day doldrums and wandered through the empty wharf again.  I’ve always been somewhat grateful that Hooters has kept a presence in our gay little town; it acts as flypaper for the kinds of guys who go to Hooters, keeping them safely out of my clubs and bars.

But the dickwads I’d come to gawp at, and perhaps taunt cruelly, just weren’t there.  There were only genteel fleece-vesters having a playful laugh.  My quest for a big, smelly pile of hypocritical mainstream sleaze had come a cropper.

But now at least I know where to take Mom and Dad for some really good key lime pie.